Type 95 Ha-Go

The Type 95 was designed in the early 1930s to give Japan's fast-moving formations a tank that could keep pace with motorised infantry and mechanised cavalry. Existing light tanks were too slow, and the Army wanted a vehicle for reconnaissance, infantry support and exploitation in the wide-open spaces of Manchuria and China — speed and range mattered far more than armour or gun power.

Developed by Mitsubishi and accepted in 1935, the Ha-Go was a compact, lightly built machine weighing only about 7.5 tonnes. It suited Japan's strategic situation perfectly: cheap to build, easy to ship across a vast maritime empire, and ideal for colonial warfare against enemies with little armour. It went on to become the most-produced Japanese tank of the war.

The Ha-Go was fast and nimble, with a reliable air-cooled diesel engine and good range, and it could go where heavier tanks could not. It was armed with a 37 mm gun and two machine guns — adequate against infantry and the light opposition it was built to face. For reconnaissance and pursuit it was a genuinely useful little tank.

Its fatal flaw was protection. The armour was at most around 12 mm — enough to stop rifle and machine-gun fire but nothing more — and the tank could be knocked out by virtually any anti-tank weapon, including the heavy machine guns and small cannon carried by Allied infantry and vehicles. The cramped one-man turret also overloaded the commander, who had to spot, aim, load and fire the gun while directing the tank.

Attempts were made to improve it, including up-gunned and amphibious derivatives for the Navy's island campaigns, but the basic vehicle was simply too small and too lightly built to be developed into anything that could survive on a modern battlefield.

The Ha-Go shared the flaw that crippled the French cavalry tanks, and for the same reason: it was designed when nobody was sure how much work a tank commander could do. The one-man turret left the commander aiming and loading the 37 mm gun while also directing the driver, watching the battlefield and, in most vehicles, working the radio if there was one.

In the infantry-support war it was designed for — against Chinese forces with almost no armour and little anti-tank capability — that was tolerable. Against an enemy who shot back with tank guns it was not, and the deficiency was structural: there was no room in a 7.4-tonne vehicle to add a crewman, so the problem could not be fixed without designing a different tank.

The warning came early and was not acted on. In the summer of 1939 at Nomonhan, on the Manchurian-Mongolian border, Japanese armour met Soviet tanks and armoured cars in a full-scale border war and was comprehensively beaten — outgunned, outnumbered and out-thought by a mechanised force under Zhukov.

The lesson available was that Japanese tanks were too lightly armed and armoured for a first-class opponent. The conclusion actually drawn was that the army’s future lay south, against colonial garrisons, where the existing vehicles would be adequate — which for two years they were. Nomonhan is the point at which the Ha-Go’s obsolescence was demonstrated and filed away.

Several variants of the Ha-Go appeared. There were versions adapted for the cold of Manchuria, experimental up-gunned models, and — most distinctively — the Type 2 Ka-Mi amphibious tank, based on Ha-Go components and fitted with detachable pontoons, developed for the Imperial Japanese Navy's amphibious landings in the Pacific.

The chassis and running gear also influenced and shared components with other light Japanese designs. But the standard Type 95 remained the principal version throughout, serving from the late 1930s right to the end of the war with only modest changes — a sign both of its essential soundness for its role and of Japan's limited capacity to replace it.

The Ha-Go served across the whole sweep of Japan's war. It fought the Soviets at Khalkhin Gol in 1939, ranged through China, and spearheaded the lightning conquests of Malaya, the Philippines, Burma and the Dutch East Indies in 1941–42, where its speed and the near-total absence of Allied armour let it run almost unchecked.

The Ha-Go was the most-produced Japanese tank of the war — some 2,300 built — and for the fast, lightly-opposed campaigns of 1941–42 its speed and reliability were real virtues. But it had been designed in the mid-1930s to fight infantry and other light tanks: its 37 mm gun and thin armour left it hopelessly behind once it met the tanks and anti-tank weapons of a modern army.

In the island fighting of the central Pacific the story changed completely. Against American Shermans, bazookas and anti-tank guns the thin-skinned Ha-Go was desperately vulnerable, and Japanese light-tank counterattacks were often destroyed within minutes of starting — on Saipan in June 1944 an entire tank regiment was wrecked in a single night attack.

Ha-Gos remained in service to the very end, fighting on Pacific islands, in Burma, and finally against the overwhelming Soviet armoured columns that poured into Manchuria in August 1945. Everywhere it met modern tanks the result was the same — a fast, willing machine hopelessly outclassed by the firepower ranged against it.

On the Pacific islands the Ha-Go finished its war motionless. Unable to survive contact with a Sherman — whose 75 mm gun would pass through the Japanese tank’s 12 mm armour from any angle at any range, while the 37 mm could not reliably penetrate the American tank at all — surviving vehicles were dug in as fixed firing positions, hull-down with only the turret exposed.

It was the most useful thing left to do with them. A buried Ha-Go was a small, hard-to-spot armoured pillbox with a gun that could still kill infantry and light vehicles, and on Saipan, Guam and Peleliu that is largely how they were used — the same conclusion the Germans reached with engineless Italian heavy tanks, arrived at from the opposite direction.

The Type 95 Ha-Go was a good light tank for its time and purpose, and a telling illustration of Japan's whole approach to armoured warfare. Fast, reliable and well-suited to reconnaissance and colonial campaigns, it did valuable work in China and in the early Pacific victories where it faced little serious opposition.

But like the Chi-Ha that fought beside it, the Ha-Go was overtaken by a war it was never built for. Against the modern armour of the United States and the Soviet Union its thin protection and light gun left it almost defenceless, and it ended the war as a symbol of how far Japanese tank design — starved of priority behind the fleet and the air arm — had been left behind by its enemies.

• Steven J. Zaloga, Japanese Tanks 1939–45 (Osprey, New Vanguard).
• Peter Chamberlain & Chris Ellis, Tanks of the World 1915–1945 (Cassell).